


Falstaff

by Hrafnsvaengr



Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Basically I decided to turn Clint into a sort of Falstaffian character, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Clint Needs a Hug, Deaf Clint Barton, Every-fucking-one needs a hug, Just angst and nothing but angst, M/M, and this is what happened
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-19
Updated: 2016-02-19
Packaged: 2018-05-21 16:38:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6058510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hrafnsvaengr/pseuds/Hrafnsvaengr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint, the playful archer with a quip for all occasions, has left the Avengers, left his friends, and gone off alone. This is what happened when Buck went looking for him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Falstaff

**Author's Note:**

> FALSTAFF: ...banish not him  
> thy Harry's company, banish not him thy Harry's  
> company: banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.
> 
> PRINCE HAL: I do, I will.
> 
> (Henry IV Part I – William Shakespeare)

“You didn't have to run away again. If you wanted to be alone, I wouldn't have said no.”

The sandy blond head shook slowly and Clint laughed, “No, no, you know I couldn't do that. I needed to stop and I couldn't do that if the one who made me start was there.”

***

“You don’t have to tell us everything, Buck. We’ve all read the report, so put away your papers. You don’t need a script with us to--”

“No. I have to tell it right. Tell it proper. I  _ need _ to tell it right.”

“Okay then. We’re listening.”

***

I had joined the team only a few days ago when I first met Barton. He was busy making coffee in the common room and I walked in to see him singing “Baby Got Back” at an obscene volume. He was startled when he turned and saw me. Everyone was, back then. I was quiet, I still am quiet, and like I was told by Barton more times than I can remember, I was ‘one creepy motherfucker, Barnes’.

We didn’t say anything of course; I didn’t talk much at all during that time. The time before...before I knew who I was. But he seemed an honest guy. He joked too often, was quiet too often, and gave himself to duty too many times to be a happy man, but that made him no less an honest one.

The man I’d met then was, I would find out later from our friends, from the team, not the same person as he had been. He’d been through a lot, Clinton had. I found out as I recovered who I was, who I had been, and eventually whom I would become. I think that Clint lost himself somewhere along the way; piece by fragile piece of himself drifting away like the ghosts of breath in frigid air. A single lonely puff, caught now and then by the bright sunlight of recognition and then lost in the silver haze of the day.

I thought, at one point, that perhaps I would love him. Not as a lover, an amorous suitor, but perhaps as friend or brother or simple travelling companion. I think, perhaps he did love me, at one point. I don’t know any longer. It’s hard to say what thoughts grace men’s minds when they travel through life. It’s one thing to try and untangle one’s own thoughts, and another quite beside when the thoughts knotty and strained live within the walls of another skull.

We wall ourselves up, plastering over the cracks and crannies and think ourselves untouched by the world, and by our graces we think ourselves on certain ground; and then one day along comes our fate and with a little pin bores through our walls and unsettles the grounds on which they stand; and suddenly we are left merely standing on clouds of memory, the gases and vapours of our lives; our granite walls no more than loose-spun candyfloss melting in morning dew.

I don’t know where my words come from when I write them here. Perhaps there’s a kind of sense in them, perhaps there’s not; I don’t care anymore. The story I have to tell is not one of carefully wrought prose and sturdy diction; my story comes not pouring forth from the shallow matter of my brain but from the depths of my heart and within the deepest corners of it, from the very pinprick spark of my soul.

***

_ “All the cops have wooden legs, And the bulldogs all have rubber teeth, And the hens lay softboiled eggs!”  _ Clint had been shouting out the song for twenty minutes, his eyes wide and unseeing, his fingers twisted whiteknuckled in his hair.

“Come on, Clint,” said Buck, the halfspilt glass of water still held out, “You have to have a drink, you haven't had—”

Clint stopped suddenly, his hand darting out and slapping the glass out of Bucky's grip. The glass shattered on the wall as Clint's clear blue eyes fixed the other man in place. “I told you. No drink. Not anymore. I'm not going to drink. I can't, I can't, I…” he trailed off, repeating the words into silence.

Water dripped down the wall and puddled at the baseboards in the glittering corpse of the shattered glass.

“All right. No drink. Just stay with me, okay buddy? Stay here with me.”

Clint nodded, settling back on the bed and staring at the ceiling. His moment of lucidity passed away slowly and he began to mumble again.

_ “There's a lake of stew, And of whiskey too, You can paddle all around them, In a big canoe, In the Big Rock Candy Mountains!” _

***

It wasn't long before I fell for the first time. I was confused, everything was out of joint, in my head was all my thoughts jumbled together into a mass of pain and memory. And when I fell, I fell hard.

I ran away for three weeks before I stopped moving for more than a day. To this day I'm still not sure how I ended up in Prague. I went through so many places and false names that I was sure I'd be as invisible as the tide’s motion. The sea is so vast and full and its bounds, its coasts move only by a few metres every day, moving so slowly that this great infinite blue tricks the eye into thinking it is simple and eternal.

What I would have done to be like a single grain of sand taken up by the wide ocean, a singular point among countless multitudes taken and washed clean of my past. Debaptised into a blank slate, no past, no name, no person but how I was born: born of my own powers and will.

But who can wash off the balm they put on themselves? Who can wash away a past so long and carefully crafted? The sea may cover a multitude of grains of sand and sometimes it can carry them far away and wash them of their incidental dust and salty grime.

But even the sea must in its time drop sand on sand and then fall back again, ebbing away and leaving the grain there full to the bright light of the sun. And that grain of sand, that simple particle among the multitude, is not in itself changed. It may be worn smooth or cleansed by waters, but it is no less sand than when it first was bathed.

You brought me back, the team, my team brought me back. And each time I was comforted, I was taught again who I was, who I am, and after a while, I didn’t need to run anymore. I didn’t need to escape into the oblivion of anonymity; I didn’t need to be anonymous anymore because I knew who I was. I was a someone, so I didn’t need to become no one.

I saw Clint less and less over time. I didn’t know why. I guess I still don’t, not really; but Clint steadily became part of the outside as I came inside. I still saw him now and then, and he still smiled too much, laughed too much, joked too much, still the same Clint; only now, now he drank a little too much at parties, and when he didn’t, he became quiet. But we all knew what it was like to want to be quiet for a while. To hold our own counsel is a gift we rarely get granted, and all of us here, all of us know that we hold silence to be too much a gift.

Yet still, when you were comforting me, when you were helping me find myself among the scattered sands of time, why did you not do the same for him? In finding me, Clint was lost to you. And where you searched high and low for me, scouring the earth until I was safe and home, you never saw Clint slowly leaving, even though he never left.

Our minds were broken, both of us a shattered wreck. Only one of us was saved.

***

_ “Piping down the valleys wild, Piping songs of pleasant glee, On a cloud I saw a child. And he laughing said to me.” _ Clint was quietly singing to himself as he made pancakes. It was two o’clock in the morning, maybe three, and I had finally come down from the roof. I spent a lot of my time on the roof back in those days. I needed the time alone, the time to think, to process.

“Oh, hey there, Barnes. You want some?” Clint smiled and pointed to me with the spatula, dripping a gooey blob of batter on the floor.

I shook my head, making for the elevators again. I had been coming to make myself a cup of something hot and caffeinated, but that could wait.

“Well, there's coffee if you want it. And I may have made three times as many pancakes as I can eat, so….” Clint turned a golden pancake out onto a plate then sat it on the counter, “I'd appreciate the help in hiding the evidence.”

I looked over at him, frowning suspiciously, “Aren't you… You know… Worried or anything, having me around?”

Clint shrugged and turned to fill a mug full of hot black coffee, “Why? Because you did stuff? Look around, Barnes.” His face grew wistful and distant for a moment before he smiled, “We've all done stuff, Barnes. Come on, eat up. Don't want to let them get cold or the butter won't melt.”

We sat for a long time, eating in silence. And then a curious thing happened. As I took a long sip of coffee, Clint turned to me, a question forming in the frown on his face before it reached his lips or tongue. “Do you still get…dreams?”

I shrugged and poked at my pancake.

“Do you ever talk to anyone about them?”

I shook my head after a moment's hesitation.

“Talk to one of the team. Maybe not Rogers… He's a swell guy, but he doesn't always understand what it's like.” Clint shovelled another bite into his mouth, gesturing with his fork as he thought aloud, “Nat’s pretty good, but I'm not sure if you'd get a sympathetic ear… Stark is a nice enough guy under his seventeen extra layers of ego, but it can be hard to get him to listen without trying to fix… Well… I mean… You could always talk to me, you know, if you wanted.”

I simply nodded and drank from my mug again.

“Well, if you want to. Anyway. I'm going to bed.” Clint stood, putting his plate in a sinkful of sudsy water. “See you around, Barnes.” He waved over his shoulder as he went, but stopped just outside the elevators. He turned to me and grinned mischievously. “Hey Barnes, why did the stationery salesman get arrested for assault?”

I shrugged and frowned.

“Because with every purchase of plain paper, he gave the customer a free punch!”

And with that, still laughing at his own joke, Clint went to bed. I wasn't sure if he'd helped or not. I'm still not sure. But he was the first one to take me as I was, not as they thought I could or would be. For that, I will be eternally grateful.

***

_ “Ring around the rosy, a pocketful of posy, ashes ashes, we all fall down. Ring around the rosy…” _ Around and around the song went, coming hoarse and cracking from his parched throat. He’d been singing for an hour now, plucking at the small flowers embroidered into the bedsheets and putting his pinched fingers up to his nose, smelling the blossoms that existed only in his head.

He stopped, quite suddenly, and looked me in the eye. “Are you the baker’s daughter? They say that the baker’s daughter likes her garden.” His eyes unfocused slowly, his gaze sliding off me like a drip of wax sliding down a candlestick. “Mary, Mary quite contrary, how does your garden--”

He bolted upright, hands wringing the sheets, “Mary had a little lamb, the lamb is also called a shepherd, the shepherd who leads me to green pastures, to still waters.” His fingers gripped his hair, tugging frantically at it, “Still waters, but it must be  _ se offendendo _ .” He gestured frantically with his hands, “Here’s water, here’s the man, the man goes to the water, into the deep, but darkness was on the face of the deep, a darkness,  _ the _ darkness, and” he lay back, hands wrenching his blond tangles, “And and and ohhh…for this I’ll get the darkhouse, and I’ll deserve it too, deserve the darkhouse and the whips as any madman--”

He sat up again, eyes shot through with red panic, “I can handle the whips, but what of the flames? Will my black soul burn in hell? God, please forgive, I know not what I did, I spake as a child and acted as a child and I never was allowed to be a child-- O God in heaven shed thy mercy upon me for it is as attribute of you as my sin is of me.”

I sat beside him on the small bed and took his hands into mine, “Hush now. Hush. Don't think of that stuff now, okay buddy? Just… Remember, you were singing a little while ago?”

He looked at me, a lucidity washing over him for a moment, pure and clean, he was Clint again even if only one last time, “Barnes, are we friends?”

“We sure are, buddy. Best friends. Don't you remember?” I smiled wanly at him.

He nodded then shrugged, speaking as if he were simply thinking aloud “Cool. I'm friends with Barnes. I hope Nat likes him too.”

I nodded once, “She does, buddy. She does. They all love you very much, you know that, right?” I looked to him hopefully, but the fog of his own mind twisting in on itself was back, Clint, the man I loved, wasn't listening anymore. I studied his face, the skin pulled taut and pale on his cheeks. His strong face, so full of life in my memories of him seemed to have just melted away, the flesh of it weakening and pulling back, leaving just the sharp angles of his bones, his cheeks, his jaw. Even his nose seemed to be sharper, sharp as any pen.

There would be but one way, now. Only one path forward for him and I, one path which would split before long. “Why do you take a path I cannot follow? You’ve been the north star in my sky for a long time now; why do you leave me now that my compass points only to you? I’m afraid I’ll be set adrift in the wide sea and no one on this earth will be able to find me without your bright star to guide them.” I spoke quietly; he didn’t hear me...or perhaps he just didn’t listen anymore: no one listens to strangers.

The silence that fell between us didn't even have time to reach between us fully before he started quietly croaking a song again.  _ “Turn away, Why wilt thou turn away, The starry floor, The watery shore, Is gi’en thee till the break of day...” _

***

We went for coffee a few times, always under the guise of Clint wanting to get me reacquainted with the city. It was a thin ruse at best, but no one mentioned it and we were happy.

He talked to me about what had happened to me, what had happened to him, how it had been getting back into the world. He didn't try to give me therapy, nor was he an inquisitor delving into the sins of my past. And lone among all our friends, he never pretended it hadn't happened.

“You know, you remind me of a song my mother used to sing me when I was a kid,” he said one day while he picked at a deathly dry scone.

“Yeah? What song's that?”

He shrugged and shook his head, “It's a secret.”

“Come on, bird brain. Tell me!” I smiled and reached across the table to poke him.

“Nope. Not gonna tell.”

And he didn't. At least, not for a long while. It was on our last mission together before he…before, and we were waiting on a rooftop watching over the President of Finland.

“Hey Tyger, did you ever figure out what song you remind me of?”

I looked at him for a long moment and the look on my face must have said I thought he was crazy, because he laughed and shook his head.

“The look on your face!” he gasped in a breath between fits of laughter, “Fuck, Tyger, you'd think I just spoke Latin at you.”

It clicked then, a memory years old falling loose. “You said a song reminded you of me and then you started calling me Tyger.”

“I sure did.”

“In that case, no, I never figured it out.”

He grinned and fell silent for a few minutes before looking at me again, “Hey, Tyger, do you believe in God?”

I shrugged, “Haven't really thought about it since the thirties.”

Clint nodded and bumped his shoulder against mine, “Well, whichever of us gets to see the Big Guy first, we should probably put in a good word for the other.”

I laughed quietly and nodded, “Will do.”

His face went suddenly dour, “Who says you'll kick the bucket first?”

“Dunno. Just a feeling. I've had a good run any--”

He interrupted me, speaking sharply, “Nope. None of that. We're gonna go on missions together in fifty years when you've gone old and grey and I'm still this specimen of perfection you see today,” he gestured to his body, eyebrows quirked, “And I'll remind you of you saying you'd lived enough and laugh at you when you eat those words.”

I laughed, bumping his shoulder, “Deal. But only if you tell me that song.”

He went quiet again, seemingly marshalling his thoughts before he began to sing in a deep quiet voice.  _ “Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry?” _

***

“Someone! Anyone!” I had left the room for a moment to get another glass of water, but I rushed back when I heard Clint shouting. “I need a drink, just one, a little one, please? Anyone!”

When he saw me, his eyes focussed more clearly than before, “Tyger! Please! Just one glass. Just one. You can do a friend a solid and do that, huh?”

I shook my head slowly and put out my hand with the glass of water in it. “Only water, buddy. Remember?”

He took the glass and threw it against the wall, shouting incoherently.

I sat on the bed next to him and looked at the clock. A quarter past midnight. Unsure what else I could do, I took his hand in mine and began to quietly sing to him.  _ “Tyger Tyger, burning bright…” _

It was about twenty minutes later that he looked at me from where he was leaning on my side. “Tyger, can you get me another blanket? And can you take these out for me?” He reached up weakly and fumbled for his aides. His eyes were clear and his voice was soft.

I reached down and carefully took them off his ears, switching them off with a quick flick of my thumb. Then I nodded and grabbed a blanket, laying it carefully over him. I reached into the blankets to tuck them around his feet and they were as cold as stone.

I looked to him and his eyes were closed, his breathing shallow, and moved my hand up his leg, past his calf, past his knee, and all was as cold as any stone.

And for the first time, I wept.

***

I’ve thought many times about ending it in the days since. And then I remember what Clint said, all those months and years ago. There is but one way when you are given a gift like the gave me; when you are given back your soul, you cannot choose but to make yourself worthy of that gift.

I was told once by Clint that his favourite quote was one from an old dead German guy. “Death comes to all, but great achievements build a monument which shall endure until the sun grows cold.”

I must now make my life be the monument to him. At the cost of his own soul, he saved mine. Wherever he is now, either in heaven or in hell, I wish I were too. But…no, he's not in hell. No one who could save me from perdition could go there. And so, it's in his name that I go on.

I tried many times to rebaptise myself in the sea of anonymity. What I didn't know was that no one can baptise themselves.

In his name, I will work to save someone how he saved me. For if I may do half of what he did for me, he will be known until the ends of time. Perhaps I'll even join him some way. I have it on good authority that someone put a good word in with the Big Guy for me.

**Author's Note:**

> As always, thank you for reading! If you have any comments, corrections, whatever, let me know. This is unbeta'd, so any mistakes are entirely mine. You can also blame the disgusting amount of literary references entirely on the fact that I'm a giant fucking nerd--I make no apologies for it.


End file.
